September 2016 - tor-relays - lists.torproject.org

tomhek - the (new) biggest guard relay operator
by nusenu 14 Sep '16

14 Sep '16

Hi Tom, thank you for operating so many relays with such a perfect MyFamily configuration, you have become the biggest (known) guard relay operator on the tor network as of 2016-09-09 and once all your new relays will gain the guard flag your guard fraction will increase even further. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ornetstats/stats/master/o/main_guard_oper… Unfortunately all your relays run in the most used guard capacity ASes, please consider choosing other ISPs as well when adding more relays to increase diversity. (A more diverse network should be considered more resilient to attacks and outages.) Considering digital oceans traffic pricing, I'm also wondering why DO is so popular? https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ regards, nusenu tomhek relays: +--------------+---------------------+-----------------+----------+ | nickname | as_name | IP | FP | +--------------+---------------------+-----------------+----------+ | DinoaurTor16 | OVH SAS | 5.39.76.158 | 0CD23887 | | DinoaurTor17 | OVH SAS | 5.196.73.86 | FA55B57C | | DinoaurTor18 | OVH SAS | 5.196.73.88 | 5959E696 | | DinoaurTor20 | ONLINE S.A.S. | 163.172.29.81 | E44B773C | | DinoaurTor19 | ONLINE S.A.S. | 163.172.211.135 | 5AD8B42D | | DinoaurTor24 | ONLINE S.A.S. | 163.172.29.9 | C61D1EA1 | | DinoaurTor21 | ONLINE S.A.S. | 163.172.38.173 | FB733C67 | | DinoaurTor22 | ONLINE S.A.S. | 163.172.38.175 | FBFE4534 | | DinoaurTor23 | ONLINE S.A.S. | 163.172.28.159 | 52E8508F | | DinoaurTor10 | Digital Ocean, Inc. | 45.55.162.210 | 434E2796 | | DinoaurTor14 | Digital Ocean, Inc. | 95.85.21.196 | CECA079E | | DinoaurTor12 | Digital Ocean, Inc. | 95.85.41.239 | 611CBC19 | | DinoaurTor9 | Digital Ocean, Inc. | 45.55.162.189 | 8F73A7FF | | DinoaurTor15 | Digital Ocean, Inc. | 188.166.58.190 | 2F479358 | | DinoaurTor3 | Digital Ocean, Inc. | 46.101.245.10 | C41F60F8 | | DinoaurTor2 | Digital Ocean, Inc. | 95.85.41.114 | 9B99C72B | | DinoaurTor5 | Digital Ocean, Inc. | 178.62.26.219 | 317E00F4 | | DinoaurTor13 | Digital Ocean, Inc. | 178.62.211.195 | 0DB81001 | | DinoaurTor11 | Digital Ocean, Inc. | 188.166.63.60 | B12A4EF2 | | DinoaurTor6 | Digital Ocean, Inc. | 45.55.159.232 | B70CFA35 | | DinoaurTor1 | Digital Ocean, Inc. | 178.62.12.24 | FCB6695F | | DinoaurTor4 | Digital Ocean, Inc. | 178.62.26.186 | F78F391C | | DinoaurTor7 | NULL (manual: DO) | 138.68.66.236 | CE91251C | | DinoaurTor8 | NULL (manual: DO) | 138.68.74.104 | FEA0CDB9 | +--------------+---------------------+-----------------+----------+ OVH, ONLINE SAS and DO are all within the top 4 guard capacity ASes: +------------+--------+---------------------+ | guard_prob | relays | as_name | +------------+--------+---------------------+ | 17.028 | 579 | OVH SAS | | 16.380 | 312 | ONLINE S.A.S. | | 9.678 | 373 | Hetzner Online GmbH | | 9.339 | 485 | Digital Ocean, Inc. | +------------+--------+---------------------+

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Tor path selection upon failure
by Liu, Zhuotao 13 Sep '16

13 Sep '16

Hi Folks, There have been some technical reports about how to deal with the problem when a botnet uses Tor as its primary C&C channel. In this case, the CPU of some relays is exhausted, causing circuit creation failure. I am wondering currently how a client reacts when its circuit creation fails? Does the client simply resend another create cell or it will re-select new path instead? Thanks

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RPM distro users: Make sure you are using EPEL repo to get the latest tor packages
by nusenu 13 Sep '16

13 Sep '16

Make sure you switched to EPEL's tor packages if you used torproject's RPM repository in the past. EPEL provides the latest tor version (currently 0.2.8.7 [2]), former torproject RPMs are no longer updated at all [1]. The migration to EPEL packages includes some manual steps, like filesystem permission fixing (EPEL uses another username for the tor system account). Deprecation trac ticket: [3] [1] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2016-June/011070.html [2] https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-EPEL-2016-1b53e559ba https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-EPEL-2016-1dc5947199 [3] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/19501

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Weird traffic spikes?
by tmbates12 13 Sep '16

13 Sep '16

Right now my relay is set at a maximum advertised bandwidth of 12MB/s, over time as the traffic has increased I've noticed that the traffic would increase a large amount and then my consensus weight would drop on its own over time, and then the traffic would drop drastically, is there any reason as to why it does this every once in a while? Here's the Atlas link: https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/ABF5C38A93F2D7E77A226871AB0ADB052279B…

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How to include files into torrc?
by Ralph Seichter 11 Sep '16

11 Sep '16

Hello, is it possible to include files into torrc? Something like this: # /etc/tor/torrc ORPort 443 # Policies are kept in separate file for readability Include /etc/tor/policies I checked https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-manual.html.en but could not find anything. As an alternative, one can of course generate torrc from other files, but I'd rather use an include feature, if available. -Ralph

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British Airways website blocking non exit relays IPs?
by Pascal Terjan 10 Sep '16

10 Sep '16

I haven't been able to access BA website from home for the last few weeks. I have failed to get any other answer on the phone that to try using Internet Explorer or to wait for things to maybe get fixed. Twitter support was not more helpful. I am now wondering is this is because I run a (non exit) relay. Can anyone confirm if they also have the problem? http://ba.com/ Error is: The requested URL was rejected. Please contact our support team on Telephone: (+44) 0344 493 0787 option 3 (calls charged at local rate within the UK) Daily 06:00-20:00 UK time. Please quote support ID 13240401227540154825

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Re: [tor-relays] [tor-relays-universities] Legal issues relevant to UK
by Jens Kubieziel 09 Sep '16

09 Sep '16

X-Post from tor-relays-universities@ I ran some relays at Geman universities in the past. I guess my experiences won't help here. Maybe someone on tor-relays has experience with running a relay at an UK university, so I send this mail to tor-relays@ too. * Duncan Guthrie schrieb am 2016-09-01 um 01:09 Uhr: > I'm hoping to run a Tor relay here at a University in the UK. > Is there anyone here who might have some experience with this in the > past? I have been researching legal issues but information is > extremely sparse (mostly relating to the DMCA). All I can really work > out is that the issues relating to ISPs apply more generally, and more > strictly to a Tor exit node operator. > What protections, if any, exist here in the UK for a Tor exit node > operator? > > Thanks, > Duncan > _______________________________________________ > tor-relays-universities mailing list > tor-relays-universities(a)lists.torproject.org > https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays-universiti… -- Jens Kubieziel http://www.kubieziel.de Die meisten großen Taten, die meisten großen Gedanken haben einen belächelnswerten Anfang. Albert Camus

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experiences with debian tor 0.2.8.6 package from deb.torproject.org
by tor relay 08 Sep '16

08 Sep '16

Hi, I'm running a relay on debian jessie using packages from deb.torproject.org. I want to share the problems I had so others are aware of them when upgrading their relays. While upgrading from 0.2.7.6 to 0.2.8.6 via apt-get, I did a tail -f syslog to make sure I notice problems during the upgrade. (I expected a simple restart of all running tor instances) I use debian's multi instance systemd service file. When upgrading, all running tor instances are stopped (not restarted, as expected) syslog shows: Interrupt: we have stopped accepting new connections, and will shut down in 30 seconds. Interrupt again to exit now. Clean shutdown finished. Exiting. (problem is reproducible) Side note (unrelated to the upgrade but also relevant for the debian tor package from deb.torproject.org repo): Stopping the default instance stops all instances due to /lib/systemd/system/tor@.service: [...] PartOf=tor.service ReloadPropagatedFrom=tor.service How about using the same way as the RPM maintainer does - so one can enable the default instance without affecting all others? PartOf=tor-master.service ReloadPropagatedFrom=tor-master.service

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Which OS gives usually the best performance for a relay?
by Farid Joubbi 07 Sep '16

07 Sep '16

Hello, I am thinking of setting up a new relay. I know that the hardware in the server is going to be the bottleneck, not my Internet connection. I have a problem deciding on which OS to use for the relay. A few years ago when I had a similar relay going, I had it running on OpenBSD first. Then I changed the OS to FreeBSD and the performance got about 20% better. I have no idea if this would be the case today too. So I think that maybe it's either FreeBSD or Debian that would be "best", but I have nothing concrete to base that decision on unless I try them both. I am going to use a Via C7 board in this specific case. So I suspect that it's the maturity of the VIA drivers in the OS that is going to make the difference. Still I would like to know how to think in similar situations in the future even for other hardware. Has anyone any concrete experience of the tor relay speeds on different operating systems? I don't want to start a flame war of religious beliefs, but I suspect that OSes differ in how optimized they are for different tasks. Thankful for any constructive input on this. Regards, Farid

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Tor and Diplomatic Immunity
by Kenneth Freeman 07 Sep '16

07 Sep '16

Do embassies and consulates run Tor nodes? AFAIK no studies have been done on this, but diplomatic immunity and Tor would seem to be a match made in Heaven.

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